Deputy Minister Kim Yong-beom of the Blue House Policy Office said, "Artificial intelligence (AI) is now a war not of 'coding' but of 'electricity,'" and noted, "The power grid should no longer be the target of local complaints but be elevated to national strategic infrastructure."
On the 18th, according to the Blue House, Deputy Minister Kim stated accordingly in a post on her social media (SNS) Facebook the previous day, saying, "AI is no longer an abstract software industry but a massive equipment industry." The point is that, to get ahead in inter-country AI technology competition, the core lies not in software but in hardware such as building large-scale data centers and establishing the power grid to support them.
Deputy Minister Kim, citing a hallmark of the AI era in which technological gaps quickly narrow, argued, "What is scarce now is not code but physical resources like graphics processing units (GPUs), memory, power, and transmission grids."
She continued, "Intelligence is shared and replicated quickly. Models are chased. Code spreads. But power plants and transmission grids, and semiconductor fabs cannot be replicated overnight," diagnosing that "AI is shifting from an artistic algorithm contest to a weight-class contest of capital and physical infrastructure."
Pointing to Korea's reality of having top-tier memory production capacity, she also asked rhetorically, "When SK hynix and Samsung Electronics' high-bandwidth memory (HBM) is mounted on Nvidia GPUs and heads to overseas data centers, what happens if we fail to sufficiently build large-scale AI compute clusters at home?"
Deputy Minister Kim also offered an analogy: "While making world-class cooking appliances, we could end up not using them properly in our own kitchen." She added, "It is not that Korea lacks electricity, but the question is whether we can supply power at the scale and speed AI demands," and stressed, "We must address not only expanding total generation capacity but also transmission and distribution grids, site selection, and permitting speed."
She further added, "We should make clear the 'produce and consume locally' principle for electricity and restructure so that regions producing power share in industrial benefits," and "We must view the power grid as security infrastructure, invest state finances, institutionalize public-private cooperation, and build governance responsible for stable operations."
In addition, Deputy Minister Kim said, "AI is no longer just part of technology policy but an issue that requires industry, energy, fiscal, and land strategies to move together," and emphasized, "The 12th Basic Plan for Long-term Electricity Supply and Demand and power industry restructuring are not mere energy policies. They are the juncture that will determine whether Korea remains an 'intelligence importer' or leaps to become an 'intelligence producer.'"
Earlier, as the government decided to push ahead as planned with building two large nuclear power plants under the 11th basic plan for electricity supply and demand, this is interpreted as signaling an intention to continue energy policy aligned with demand from growth-driver industries such as AI data centers going forward.